Virtual Clothing: A Waste of Money or a Way to Save the Planet in Style?

A Gucci bag going for several thousand dollars is not news. But a Gucci bag that you can only wear in the metaverse going for more than its IRL counterpart is certainly eye-catching.

In May, Gucci welcomed spring in the virtual world when it opened the Gucci Garden on the Roblox gaming platform. Its bee-embroidered Dionysus bag was one of the shoppable items. Priced at 475 Robux (the world's in-game currency), that came to $6, or considerably less than its $3,400 real-world price. But just as in real life, the virtual world's resale market can be a seller’s game, and bids on the bag skyrocketed. One eventually sold for 350,000 Robux, or $4,115. 

These online-only exclusives are a trend that fashion brands of all stripes are getting behind. The Gucci Garden, an immersive environment meant to mimic an actual installation in Florence, Italy, was just the latest virtual offering from the luxury brand. Under the reign of Designer Alessandro Michele, the brand has leveled up the accessory game of characters in The Sims 4 and Pokémon trainers, who can pick up items from The North Face x Gucci Collection at 100 PokéStops located at Gucci pins. And the Gucci Virtual 25 sneakers can be worn by avatars in Roblox and the social media platform VRChat.

The entire collection is also available in Gucci’s app for $11.99 for customers who want to wear them in photos and videos using augmented reality. 

Michele is one of fashion’s most attention-grabbing designers today; he's possibly only outranked by Virgil Abloh. Founder of luxury streetwear brand Off-White, Abloh is known in part for his Dadaist collabs, like the one he did for Ikea that featured clocks that said “Temporary” and bags that proclaimed themselves “Sculpture.” He has since brought his boldness and innovation to Louis Vuitton as the artistic director of its menswear collection—part of which is set to take place in the metaverse.

“[F]unny thing is, the real world is just the part-time metaverse,” Abloh wrote in a February Instagram post in which he talked about the intermingling of physical and digital things. "Now back to this Ready Player-esque One ‘think-tank’ of mine.”

Abloh later told venture capitalist Matthew Ball "I want to make virtual clothes to paint pictures physical clothes cannot, and let buyers access a new dimension of their personal style—no matter who they are, where they live, and the virtual worlds they love."

"I’m helping [him] create exactly that kind of brand," Ball wrote in a blog post.

In-App Purchases, But Make It Fashion

The road there has already been paved by companies like The Fabricant, which bills itself as "a digital fashion house leading the fashion industry towards a new sector of digital-only clothing." Its garments are 3D-modeled so customers can wear them in VR environments. Appropriately, they can only be purchased in Ethereum.

Michaela Larosse, who works on creative strategy and communications at The Fabricant, says that digital fashion is the evolution of video game skins. "Physical fashion brands are beginning to iterate in this space as global revenue for in-game purchases is already huge and digital fashion will form part of that," she says.

Visit Tribute Brand's site, and you’re greeted with a message from the future: "This is the platform for contactless & cyber fashion." The digital-only brand sells limited-edition, ready-to-wear and custom garments for prices that are upmarket in the real world. Once an item is purchased, the customer sends a photo of themselves in for a digital fitting and in a few days they receive an image of themselves in their new outfit. 

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Digital fashion marketplace DressX works in a similar fashion, though customers upload a photo first, and then submit it along with their purchase of an item, like fashion student Sofia Vaiman's  birds of paradise/video game warrior pants and top.

Before hitting the buy button, shoppers will see a statement that includes the sentence, "The 100% digital collection did not require any material fabrics, water, or CO2 for shipping and deliveries, creating the blueprint for traditional fashion institutions and optimizing art education in the 21st Century."

Fight Climate Change With a Digital Wardrobe

Sustainability is a large part of what DressX is selling. "Don't shop less, shop digital fashion," its vision statement says. This gets to one of the things fueling the expansion of digital fashion: The terrible reputation of fast fashion.

The rapid production of garments to meet the neverending fashion seasons that pass on the internet is an ecological and labor nightmare. Fast fashion contributes significantly to climate change and creates an immense amount of waste when its products are soon dumped as they go out of style or rapidly deteriorate. The working conditions and pay for garment workers are exploitative and sometimes fatal. 

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Social media is full of fashion hauls, with influencers showing off outfit after outfit from huge piles they amassed from places like Shein, which has facilities in China that churn out incredibly cheap clothing that trends like crazy on TikTok. Much of that clothing doesn’t get worn outside of posts, so a digital alternative can save wannabe influencers money and give the environment some breathing room.  

"The Fabricant was created for this very reason: To create beautiful garments that allow us to explore our identity in an innovative way without the planet paying the price for our desire to express ourselves," Larosse says. "The reality is, we just don’t need any more physical stuff or to waste any of our precious natural resources just to have clothing sit in closets or end up landfill."

Digital fashion can also be more inclusive, as clothing is made to fit a photo or avatar instead of a human body. While there has been a push to expand sizing in an industry built mainly of straight-size brands, there are still inequities when plus-sized customers face a rack in a clothing store. And for those who want to experiment with gender norms in dressing, doing so in a digital space can be more comfortable than in a public one.

All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go

It would be hard to ignore another reason why we’re seeing more digital fashion: In the grip of a pandemic, we haven’t been able to experience much outside of screens. If clothes are about seeing and being seen, where they are seen has radically changed. 

"Initially our work was seen as an interesting outlier but not something that physical brands felt the need to participate in," Larosse says. "The pandemic quite dramatically changed perspectives on what we do and made the benefits of our work very tangible."

Balenciaga Designer Demna Gvsalia showed the brand’s autumn/winter 2021 show in virtual reality by sending out 330 Oculus headsets to guests. The spring/summer 2022 collection was presented in video form, featuring a fake audience and one model cloned with deepfake technology to look like a full gaggle on the runway. 

At the end of the day, or more likely in a year, we will emerge. People are not 1s and 0s populating a VR world. We’re living in a real one, but sometimes we need to play around to figure out what we want in it.